Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Anyone who has spent any amount of time on YouTube can attest that the comments section beneath the videos contains some of the most neanderthal rhetoric you're ever likely to find on the internet (and that's saying a lot). Perhaps because of this (I'm too lazy to look it up, get off my back! UPDATE: Reader Brandon reports that the feature was added in response to this online comic: http://xkcd.com/481/), they added an 'Audio Preview' button that will read your post aloud, allowing you to hear how it sounds when someone says it instead of just typing it. The idea being, I guess, that once you hear it read out loud you'll realize what a petty moron you sound like. But the speech synthesis is actually quite good and could certainly serve as sample fodder if you use an audio recording utility such as Audio Hijack Pro to capture its output. It is definitely grainy and muddy, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, and some clever EQing and time in an audio editing program could probably clean it up quite a bit. Benny Benassi, eat your heart out!